This sounds like it is your first time connecting your Tivo to try to transfer recordings on Tivo to/from PCs.

The Tivo, by default, does not have transfers/downloads enabled. You would need to go to tivo.com, MY ACCOUNT and login, under DVR Preferences, you would find boxes for TRANSFERS and DOWNLOADS for each Tivo box on your account, check them. It would take up to 24 hrs to receive a Media Access Key (MAK) on your Tivo (s). You would need to use that MAK as well, enter it into Tivo Desktop under the menus.

Tivo can work under wireless and wired networks even if they are mixed.

This sounds like it is your first time connecting your Tivo to try to transfer recordings on Tivo to/from PCs.

The Tivo, by default, does not have transfers/downloads enabled. You would need to go to tivo.com, MY ACCOUNT and login, under DVR Preferences, you would find boxes for TRANSFERS and DOWNLOADS for each Tivo box on your account, check them. It would take up to 24 hrs to receive a Media Access Key (MAK) on your Tivo (s). You would need to use that MAK as well, enter it into Tivo Desktop under the menus.

Tivo can work under wireless and wired networks even if they are mixed.

Yes, It's my first time and I've been a Tivo advocate/user for over 8 yr. I'm going to put this issue in the basement for now, because there is a bigger issue.

Where is all the "real" Tivo Operating Instructions aggregated? I've read the manual several times & bookmarked items needing further explanation, gone thru the menus so many times I had to change the batteries in my remote. and spent hours searching the net, scouring forums etc. And still I don't have enough info that will allow me to operate this new Premier Tivo. Any info that is available is scattered all over the place and/or is incorrect.

Would you please be able to direct me where I can find the Tivo Bible?

Connected to my wireless router, I have two Tivos (by wire), an XP workstation (by wire), an XP laptop (by wireless) and an XP netbook (by wireless). I can transfer recordings between Tivos, or from either Tivo to any of the XP systems without any problem. This is definitely doable.

As mentioned above it takes a day or two transferring recordings is supported once enabled.

I don't know of a Tivo bible. I would start with support.tivo.com.

[edit] As a note, all the XP systems also run Linux, and I can pull my recordings off my Tivo in Linux, too, and using TivoDecode and the MAK, convert the .tivo to .mpg for general viewing.

OP- I agree with wmcbrine- it looks like you need to bone up on two things before you would look at pytivo.

1) basic operations of the HD menus. There is no bible, but the menus are not too deep- I would suggest picking a function and then explore it (season pass/guide/suggestions/wishlists). In general, most things work like they did with your older tivos. If you prefer the old way of doing things, you can revert to the old menus, though you would be missing some valuable features.

2) it sounds like you could get some value of some better understanding of your new home network. There are lots of good tutorials out there.

OP- I agree with wmcbrine- it looks like you need to bone up on two things before you would look at pytivo.

1) basic operations of the HD menus. There is no bible, but the menus are not too deep- I would suggest picking a function and then explore it (season pass/guide/suggestions/wishlists). In general, most things work like they did with your older tivos. If you prefer the old way of doing things, you can revert to the old menus, though you would be missing some valuable features.

2) it sounds like you could get some value of some better understanding of your new home network. There are lots of good tutorials out there.

I was cruising by looking for some info on what might be the problem with intermittent ability to download to/from Tivo desktop. Thanks for the info on tivo.com regarding setups.

I found my setup was already enabled for video downloads.

Still, when I bring up Tivo Desktop and click on transfer recordings, the pop up screen tells me it can't find the DVR. I've done this several times now, managed to get it to work once, but not since then. When it worked, it downloaded 20+ hours of recording, so I know it was a solid connection.

I have replaced Bonjour and running the latest Java. (1.6?) Bonjour still does not pick up on the Tivo DVR Beacon.

I can nearly instantly open an http session on the DVR using its ip address, I wish we could hand code the ip address of the DVR into Tivo desktop so we didn't have to fool around with Bonjour which is where I think the problem may be. Also, I can ping the DVR without problems.

Anyone have an idea what the problem might be? I think maybe the software firewall on XP, I'm just now starting to jump down that path... I'd like to fix the problem instead of taking a baseball bat to it (ripping out the software and starting over again).

For your firewall, Bonjour uses UDP port 5353 and TiVo Beacon uses TCP & UDP ports 2190. The Desktop setup program will make the necessary exceptions to Windows Firewall, but if you use something else you will have to set it up manually.

Thanks again for the help, during this process I ran into a buzz saw figuratively speaking. With my wifi, (tivo is on wireless - 802.11g) I also wanted to improve my network connection to my pc. I wanted to try ethernet over powerline and found what looks like a decent product from netgear. I also wanted to try a dvd ripper by Aimersoft and to throw another wrench into the situation, Firefox decided now is the time to upgrade to 13.0. So I downloaded Aimersoft and tried to rip Independence Day but TiVo didn't pick it up even though I put it directly into the My Tivo directory. Probably a wrong format, I then powered down and made the new ethernet connection and during the reboot, Firefox downloaded 13.0 and then the fun started - BSOD's. My system had never crashed that hard before. Always with FF up and browsing and within 5 minutes. I tried IE and it worked though notoriously slow. Tired the Google browser, it worked and much faster but not as nice as FF, tired Opera and it worked too. To make a long story short, I think it ended up being a huge conflict between FF13 and Aimersoft. The BSOD's consistantly pointed to the NVidia driver. I ended up reloading FF12 and it helped a lot, but still BSOD'd occassionally. I then removed Aimersoft and I'm back to a nice stable system. Still had trouble with Tivo Desktop though not seeing the DVR. I found if I connected to the DVR via http, TiVo desktop would eventually find the DVR (with the browser up). So that helps account for intermittent discovery (incidentally, I tried Tivo Beacon Service on/off and Bonjour on/off and neither had an effect on the problem). Since my Tivo wireless connection was less than optimal (about 40%), I moved my powerline/ethernet connection to the Tivo DVR. It came up quickly once the netgear devices paired up (security pairing process). Could ping and http to the dvr from my desktop. I then tried Tivo Desktop and was amazed at how quickly the DVR was discovered. So I think the main issue with the DVR discovery was a non optimal wireless network connection. Incidentally, when Bonjour was installed, it opened a port on the firewall for itself. The firewall doesn't really tell you its udp/5353, just that its Bonjour.

Now for my next step, to find a good dvd ripper that can rip dvd movies into a format Tivo will recognize and to do it without BSOD's, probably a topic on another thread. I do hope this discription of my problem will help others resolve intermiitent TiVo Desktop connection and perhaps other issues with DVD rippers.

DVDs use .VOB and will not be recognized by Tivo Desktop or any other program involved with Tivo transfers, but they can be converted to .MPG which is recognized.

I use DVD Decrypter (free) to extract (rip) the DVDs and use VideoReDo to do QuickStream Fix to a .MPG file, which fixes most timestamp issues. However, I dropped using Tivo Desktop (Plus) for its limited services. I now use PyTivo which I have set up with multiple folders to transfer from (TD/P only allows 1). I also use KMTTG to transfer from the Tivo, do metadata, decode to .MPG, as well as 'Push' to the Tivo (this is a PyTivo service).

pyTivo has supported .VOBs for as long as I can remember. They're just MPEG-2 program streams with a different extension. In fact, when pyTivo transcodes with ffmpeg, it uses "-f vob" to specify the output format.

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